Hey devs! 👋

I've been working on a RAG-based solution that functions similarly to Context7 but at a significantly lower cost. After some rigorous testing, I thought I'd share my findings with the community.

TL;DR: This implementation costs roughly half as much as Context7 while producing code of comparable quality.

The Tests

I ran three coding challenges using Gemini-2.5-pro (set to temp=0) with both Context7 and Custom MCP:

1. Creating a Next.js page with API data fetching

2. Building a FastAPI endpoint for streaming large files

3. Developing a FastAPI WebSockets app with Redis pub/sub

I implemented a simple prompt suffix system:

• For Context7: "use context7. Max tokens: 500"

• For MCP: "use documentation"

The Results

Cost comparison: https://imgur.com/a/lGFgMHz

• Average cost savings: ~40%

• Next.js Test: Context7 ($0.056) vs Custom MCP ($0.023)

• FastAPI Streaming Test: Context7 ($0.044) vs Custom MCP ($0.031)

• WebSockets/Redis Test: Context7 ($0.052) vs Custom MCP ($0.040)

Both tools generated fully functional code that implemented all requirements, but the Custom MCP server did it at consistently lower costs.

Why This Matters

If you're building AI-powered coding tools or using them extensively in your workflow, these cost savings add up fast.

For teams making thousands of API calls daily, you could be saving hundreds or thousands of dollars monthly.

What's Next

I encourage you to try the MCP server yourself and share your feedback. Currently it supports the latest versions of Expo, FastAPI, and NextJS:

{
  "documentation": {
    "url": "https://doc-mcp.fly.dev/mcp/"
  }
}

If there's enough interest, I'll add more libraries.

Would love to hear your thoughts and questions about the approach!

Hello all,

I am working with Context 7 using the desktop app, and I must say it helps a lot — the context of the answers is much more to the point.
Now, I would like to expand to more MCPs that can assist me with coding and performing deep research while coding, particularly in related open-source projects, documentation, and code examples.

I do not want them to change my files, only provide output — I will handle the implementation myself. So, experts, please:

1. Suggest more coding-related MCPs that help you.

2. Provide good prompt suggestions for combining MCP pipelines.

MCP is early and a lot of hype is around what's possible but not what's actually useful right now. So I thought to share my top 5 most useful MCP servers that I'm using daily-weekly:

Context7: Make my AI-coding agents incredibly smarter

Playwright: Tell my AI-coding agents to implement design, add, and test UI features on its own

Sentry: Tell my AI-coding agents to fix a specific bug on Sentry, no need to even take a look at the issue myself

GitHub: Tell my AI-coding agents to create GitHub issues in 3rd repositories, work on GitHub issues that I or others created

PostgreSQL: Tell my AI-coding agents to debug backend issues, implement backend features, and check database changes to verify everything is correct

What are your top 5?

I see MCP servers being discussed all the time here and ashamed to say I only starting reading into them today, although I guess browser control would count as an MCP so other than that, but I never associated those tools with the technical phrase.

Generally which MCP servers are you using with Roocode? There are so many to choose from and build it’s kind of confusing.

And another question: what MCPs are most useful for web application development?

Thanks ily ur beautiful

Hello all,

I am working with Context 7 using the desktop app, and I must say it helps a lot — the context of the answers is much more to the point.
Now, I would like to expand to more MCPs that can assist me with coding and performing deep research while coding, particularly in related open-source projects, documentation, and code examples.

I do not want them to change my files, only provide output — I will handle the implementation myself. So, experts, please:

1. Suggest more coding-related MCPs that help you.

2. Provide good prompt suggestions for combining MCP pipelines.

I would like to use the desktop app for now; later, I will use Claude Code.
Thanks

Genuine question: What's driving all the excitement around Context7?

From what I can tell, it's an MCP server that fetches documentation and dumps it into your LLM's context. The pitch is that it solves "outdated training data" problems.

But here's what I don't get:

For 90% of use cases, Claude Sonnet already knows the docs cold. React? TypeScript? Next.js? Tailwind? The model was trained on these. It doesn't need the entire React docs re-explained to it. That's just burning tokens.

For the 10% where you actually need current docs (brand new releases, niche packages, internal tools), wouldn't a targeted web_fetch or curl be better? You get exactly the page you need, not a massive documentation dump. It's more precise, uses fewer tokens, and you control what goes into context.

I see people installing Context7 and then asking it about React hooks or Express middleware. Things that are absolutely baked into the model's training. It feels like installing a GPS to explain directions to a cab driver.

Am I completely off base here? What am I missing about why this is everywhere suddenly?

Edit: Did some digging into how Context7 actually works.

It's more sophisticated than I initially thought, but it still doesn't solve the core problem:

How it works:

• Context7 doesn't do live web fetches. It queries their proprietary backend API that serves pre crawled documentation

• They crawl 33k+ libraries on a 10-15 day rolling schedule, pre-process everything, and cache it

• When you query, you get 5,000-10,000 tokens of ranked documentation snippets

• Ranking system prioritizes: code examples > prose, API signatures > descriptions

• You can filter by topic (e.g., "routing", "authentication")

You're getting documentation that Context7 crawled up to 15 days ago from their database. You could just web_fetch the actual docs yourself and get current information directly from the source, without:

• Depending on Context7's infrastructure and update schedule

• Burning 5-10k tokens on pre-selected chunks when the model already knows the library

• Rate limits from their API

For mature, well documented frameworks like React, Next.js, or TypeScript that are baked into the training data, this is still redundant. For the 10% of cases where you need current docs (new releases, niche packages), web_fetch on the specific page you need is more precise, more current, and uses fewer tokens.

TL;DR: Context7 is a documentation caching layer with smart ranking. But for libraries Claude already knows, it's overkill. For the cases where you actually need current docs, web_fetch is more direct.

Went with full-on dev mode this week for the list of MCPs added to the platform.

This week’s focus was to allow developers to install these MCPs to their IDEs and making them more useful.

My favourite of all is Context7, It is a really special MCP built just for finding and fetching documentations for framework. I was using it personally even before this, and I think every dev will love it in their IDEs.

TL;DR
Constantly seeing Context7 praised as an effective MCP, but it seems to have some severe limitations if the required documentation is not precisely structured as a "small paragraph + code snippet" (see example below)

It seems like every two days I see Context7 being mentioned on this reddit and others as one of the most comonly used MCP servers, functioning well for coding agents. It seems like for certain documentation it can behave extremely bad though.

As an example, I was recently looking into using a CLI code agent to upgrade a Laravel project and wanted to see if Context7 could be useful. Unfortunately, it seems that the documentation returned by Context7 is completely useless, at least for this specific case.

The official Laravel documentation has a neat, separate page covering the steps for upgrading a project from one version to the next. They even provide a button to copy the entire page in markdown format.

https://laravel.com/docs/10.x/upgrade

In fact, the exact page can be found back in the github repo for that Laravel documentation:
https://github.com/laravel/docs/blob/10.x/upgrade.md
(I'm fairly sure that this is also the exact repository scraped by Context7 for the Laravel 10 docs)

However, we can check exactly what Context7 returns when searching for this with reasonable key words (simply "upgrade guide"):
https://context7.com/websites/laravel_10_x?topic=upgrade+guide
But rather than returning some clean, relevant context, it very clearly provides essentially the same bit of markdown docs and useless code snippet over and over and over again.
I suspect that, despite Context7 scraping that exact github repo and literally having the full upgrade guide available in markdown, we get these results due to the way the documentation is stored and how Context7 focuses on code snippets (rather than more complete docs).

Am I just misunderstanding something, or is this a coincidence where Context7 fails to be useful in this specific case?
It feels like the way the documentation is set up and stored, a very specific structure is needed for Context7 to be useful.

Edit:
I noticed that the Laravel 10 docs that Context7 has seems to be based on the Laravel docs website itself rather than the github repo. Wanted to test if there is more success when adding the docs through the repo but the 10.x docs are only available through a branch, which Context7 sees as an invalid github link. So maybe a feature to add to Context7 (allowing to add docs through a github repo branch-specific link)?

I've been aware of the discussions about context bloat from MCPs.

I've tried to keep my MCP servers to a minimum, and they worked well: github, context7, claude-context, material-ui, and gcloud. With recent posts mentioning bloat with the Github MCP, as well as the fact that local command line `gh` will likely solve the problem, I decided to do a comparison.

32% with Github MCP, 8% without.

Likely, Github is an MCP worth skipping given the alternative command line `gh`.

Hi, I already used context7 some time ago with Cursor and honestly I never really understood how good it was. Now I want to try again but with Claude Code and I see that people also mention ref.tool. They even have some kind of pricing on their website, meaning this thing could be paid. So what's the difference between Context7 vs Ref MCP? Please share your experience.

If Ref MCP simply reads pages, how is that different from the built-in tools of Claude Code, since it can also search the internet and read a documentation page?

Curious to learn what actually proved to be very productive to your workflows, not just a top 10 list of most popular MCPs. It doesn't have to be an MCP (sorry?) 😅

Yes! 🙌🏾 I said the same thing to a friend yesterday. Context7 is the only MCP I can recommend.

The rest add a layer of flakiness that's really frustrating.

Playwright is a major culprit here.

I also told my friend that I'm too afraid to share this view publicly because I worry that maybe it's "user error" and not the technology

Just this week I came across the Context7 mcp and have since been using it together with Copilot with great results. Context7 is a collection of documentation that is (it seems) synced directly with GitHub. And if your framework is not in the collection, you can add it by simply pasting in the repo url (provided that it has documentation in there).

I added this mcp to my user settings, along with a custom user prompt that tells Copilot to use it. This way you don't have to set it up for every project (you could though if you wanted).

settings.json

{
  "mcp": {
    "servers": {
      "Context7": {
        "type": "stdio",
        "command": "npx",
        "args": [
          "-y",
          "@upstash/context7-mcp@latest"
        ]
      }
    },
  },
  "github.copilot.chat.codeGeneration.instructions": [      
    {
      "text": "When answering questions about frameworks, libraries, or APIs, use Context7 to retrieve current documentation rather than relying on training data.",      
    }
  ],
}

So far mcp's seem to only work in agent mode though, but I found you can also ask agent mode questions as long as you tell it to not edit your code. That said I rarely feel the need to switch from agent mode to ask mode these days.

Thought I'd share!